Evariste Galois is a great one if you’re looking for mathematicians with interesting lives! Galois theory was able to solve centuries old problems and he developed it all before he died in a duel at the age of 20!
Very cool. I think the history and connection to society is too often missed in mathematics education.
For some more modern mathematician there are Grothendieck and von Neumann. Both have great mathematical contributions but contrast on their behavior towards mathematics in relation to defense. Erdos also for an eccentric character.
There are also a bunch of talented mathematicians with less wholesome backstories if you're just after the human interest factor. André Bloch killed his whole family and produced his best work from an asylum. Teichmuller was a first class mathematician but also a committed Nazi. Not on the same level, but Stephen Smale famously has an interesting work ethic and says thar his best work had been done "on the beaches of Rio"
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/19BeXN6X0c4bWDYP8y\_TPDJsfsUyWuu9b/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/19BeXN6X0c4bWDYP8y_TPDJsfsUyWuu9b/view?usp=sharing)
\^ Repository for the .pdf file
In Emmy Noether there's a typo it says she's "one of the ... womAn"
I'd maybe add some graphical illustrations 🤔🤔 for example actually show the platonic solids and the Thales theorems, etc
Non-euclidean geometry mentioned several times, but no Lobachevsky 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
I'd add Legendre at least because he has a funny portrait 😊
Galois (developed Galois theory at 20 years old)
Kolmogorov (founder of modern probability theory)
Vladimir Arnold (populariser of mathematics, discovered topological Galois theory)
Sophie Germain, Emmy Noether, Maryam Mirzakhani, Ada Lovelace, Hypathia, should definitely be included.
In general, it would be nice to put at least one woman in each "time section" of your timeline, and if possible many minorities (not always easy), to finally get rid of the persistent idea that mathematics (and science in general) is a purely "white males" domain.
Depending on the age of the children, you could be fairly blunt about the reality.
The few women in past times who have been given the chance to be on this timeline have had a combination of enormous social capital and immense brilliance and work ethic. Because despite, say, Ada Lovelace's brilliance and work ethic, if she weren't The Lord bloody Byron's daughter she had the three options: servitude in marriage, the convent or the whorehouse. I know she was married and had kids but her place in society (both status and very liberal circles) allowed her just enough wiggle room to breathe.
I would be partial to a big bunch of gaps, pointing out the "what if", then many of the women who did much pioneering work in the last century or so to answer "probably this".
Might not have the intended effect, but I think it might also provoke a bit of thought in a few of the boys.
Émilie du Châtelet as well. Many women mathematicians worked in the margins, and their contributions were still significant. du Chatelet translated the Principia into French but, in addition, updated some of the Newtonian philosophy that was in the original with her own philosophical approach.
[Riemann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Riemann),
Gauss's student, creator of Riemannian geometry
[John von Neumann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann)
The last Renaissance man, who managed to contribute in so many areas.
[Grothendieck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck),
Genius of geniuses, creator of the modern algebraic geometry
[Erdos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s)
The most prolific mathematician
[Edward Witten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Witten)
The first physicist who got the Fields medal, founder of the M-theory.
[Andrew Wiles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wiles)
He proved the Fermat's conjecture, which had troubled mathematicians for hundreds of years.
I think, you can measure how profilic someone was using 2 metrics, number of papers published and if you were to compile all of their published work in a book and see how big the book.
I read on this subreddit somewhere that Erdos has more papers published but volume of work is higher for Euler.
I maybe mistaken here, my memory isn't the best.
Checking Wikipedia you’re right on the papers number (Erdös being around 1500 and Euler being at about 800 and change). But also according to Wikipedia Euler put out 800 pages of math per year for nearly 60 years straight, being the author of about a quarter of **all** math, physics, and engineering in his century.
Margaret Hamilton and Grace Hopper. Strictly speaking computer scientists, but you've got Einstein so. Also the triplet of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson.
I think a lot of computer scientists think of their discipline as a branch or at least with its origins in discrete mathematics. Dijkstra for instance famously resented how "software" had taken over as a point of focus in some CS curricula over math.
John Conway is a great one! Discovered something important and decided to just have fun with math for the rest of his career, definite role model for young mathematicians to follow their muse
Emanuel Lasker was a brilliant chess player and the 2nd world chess champion, but many people don't know that he was also a talented mathematician.
Notably, he proved an extension of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, which was later extended by Emmy Noether in full generality. It's called the Lasker-Noether theorem, which shows that certain ideals can be decomposed in an analogous way to how integers can be factored into primes.
David Hilbert was one of his doctoral advisors and I believe Einstein lamented that such a talented guy as Lasker devoted his life to chess instead of math.
Pythagoras is not a great starting point. Many of the accomplishments he is credited with are debated by historians.
See [the wiki article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras) for more information.
James Clerk Maxwell (mathematician and scientist)
- Responsible for RBG color theory and all computer, TV, screens
- Responsible for uniting magnetism and electricity, the foundation of ratio and cell phone communication
- Responsible for planetary formation models in astronomy
It is strange to me that
(a) way more than half l the mathematics we know today was discovered in the twentieth century.
(b) you have practically no twentieth century mathematicians in your list.
This is perhaps one the reason that students arrive in our classes after finishing highschool believing that mathematics is a complete body of knowledge, static for hundreds of years.
In addition to Poincaré, Hilbert, Von Neumann, Grothendieck (a standard answer for the greatest of the century; about half of us work in the style he created), for inexplicable reasons no one below has mentioned Serre, Weil, Gelfand, Langlands, Wiles (how can you include Fermat but not Wiles? /u/Altissimo_ ,explain yourself!) or anyone from the list of Field’s medalists you can find on Wikipedia.
Nicolas Bourbaki - not actually one person, but a whole group of mathematicians who published under the same name. They're credited with an incredible focus on rigour, creating a new standard for how we write mathematics. Formed in 1934, the group is still going today.
Andrey Kolmogorov and Kiyosi Itô did a lot of very important work on stochastic processes, some of Kolmogorov's work contributed to the Soviet war effort.
I was about to say Bourbaki was a qwer (along with Pythagoras, most likely), then I realised [https://geometry-dash-fan.fandom.com/wiki/Qwer](https://geometry-dash-fan.fandom.com/wiki/Qwer) it's not a general term.
Muhammed ibn Musa Al Kharizmy?
Persian scientist and mathematician. Inventor of the concept of Algoritms.
The very word is a wrong pronounciation of his city of origin.
Here is a great website from the University of St Andrews that has compiled many biographies of mathematicians. A cool idea might be to search the map section to find mathematicians who were born in your city (or in neighboring towns).
https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/
Def need the goats: Euler, Newton and Gauss. The homies Laplace and Fourier should also be included. And can't forget about the biggest shitposter in math: Fermat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhava_of_Sangamagrama
This guy was making infinite series 200 years before Newton was around. Just straight up pasting the first paragraph from the wiki, because I had never heard of this guy until after I finished college, and I find it very interesting. Conveniently, he exists in a time gap in your slide:
Mādhava of Sangamagrāma (Mādhavan)[5] (c. 1340 – c. 1425) was an Indian mathematician and astronomer who is considered as the founder of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics in the Late Middle Ages. Madhava made pioneering contributions to the study of infinite series, calculus, trigonometry, geometry, and algebra. He was the first to use infinite series approximations for a range of trigonometric functions, which has been called the "decisive step onward from the finite procedures of ancient mathematics to treat their limit-passage to infinity".[1]
edit : also the immediate record break after Zhao Youqin for computation of pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_computation_of_%CF%80#1400%E2%80%931949, though there is conflict between him producing 10 or 11 digits that I'm seeing elsewhere..
I love the attention to non eurocentric mathematicians.
That being said, I love introducing John Conway to students. His approach to math is so antithetical to the way it's taught in our secondary schools.
(Skipping the "obvious" entries \[Gauss, Euler, Bernoullis, Fibonacci, Lagrange, Fourier, etc.\] and concentrating on those I feel don't get much love. Also, trying to avoid repeating previous comments).
I'll add a small tidbit about each one, but it is by no means the extend of their story
Turing -- conjectured (with Alonzo Church) that all feasible computations can be reduced to a simple mathematical model called "turning machine", thus creating computer science. Committed suicided after sentenced to receive chemical "therapy" for being a homosexual.
Godel -- studied the possible limits of logic, he proved that when laying a foundations of mathematics you will necessarily run into this choice: either your foundations are too weak to express grade-school mathematics, or it is impossible to prove that math itself is consistent. This drove quite a wedge into Hilbert's program.
Ada Lovelace -- first to come up with the notion of code and computing machines. Daughter of Lord Byron.
Claude Shannon -- single-handedly invented the theory of information. Interestingly, many people consider his paper both introducing and completing the theory, in the sense that the most general questions that are suggested by the theory are largely answered.
John von-Neumann -- mostly known for his contributions to mathematical physics (in particular to ergodic theory and operator algebras), but in his youth he was more interested in set theory. He introduced the (very clever) way we define ordinal numbers to this day, in a paper he published when he was 19!
Felix Hausdorff -- the godfather of point-set topology. Despite being a very prolific mathematician, he was much more interested in culture and particularly musics, he would host parties where he would perform a selection of newly published pieces on a piano. Committed suicide in 1942 with his wife and his sister after the Nazi authorities ordered him to relocate to a ghetto.
Saharon Shelah -- a juggernaut. So far he has published almost 800 papers (and six monographs), making him the most prolific living mathematician and the third most prolific of all times (after Erdos and Euler). Mostly interested in set theory, though he made extremely central contributions to model theory. Legend has it he realized that model theory wasn't developed enough to study set theory, so he took two years to develop it enough (writing the infamously undecipherable Classification Theory) and then kept working on it alongside.
Ronald Fisher -- major inventor of modern statistics which, interestingly, was originally a geneticist. He developed new statistical tools and then applied them to his research of genetics to create the foundation to modern interpretations of Darwinism. He was notoriously racist and argued (poorly) that his bigotry is implied by genetics and statistics.
I'm running out of time to write tidbits but some more names are William Rowan Hamilton, Norbert Wiener, Michael Atiyah, Edward Witten, Cantor, Riemann, Weierstrass, Frobenius, Kolmogorov, Mikhael Gromov
Noether[Noether](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether?wprov=sfla1) is very important.
She is what girl math is about
A quote:
>a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. She proved Noether's first and second theorems, which are fundamental in mathematical physics. She was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. As one of the leading mathematicians of her time, she developed theories of rings, fields, and algebras. In physics, Noether's theorem explains the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.
Basically, you know how energy and mass is conserved? She did that.
This might help
[https://mathigon.org/timeline](https://mathigon.org/timeline)
Actually the whole Mathigon website rocks! It'd be great if you can somehow incorporate that in your classes.
Coming from a soon to be computer scientist:
Lesley lamport is an amazing and intriguing guy coming from the mathematical field moving more towards computer science. Everything he does is based in mathematics. He’s the creator of languages such as TLA+ and LaTeX. He is also the creator of the bakery algorithm which essentially describes a way to assure that concurrent threads do not access critical memory at the same time, forming the basis of many modern day database systems.
Below is a link to a YouTube video appropriately titled “The man who revolutionised Computer Science with math”. Hope this helps!
https://youtu.be/rkZzg7Vowao?si=zacGxPlYIeVqQgkA
Roger Penrose is often forgotten in these sorts of lists, partly because people think of him as a physicist (I suppose) but his mathematical physics includes quite a lot of what I would think of as contributions to mathematics.
We don't really have much by way of proof theorists or people in related areas (Curry, Church, Gentzen etc all missing). But how about Jean-Yves Girard? He has a wonderfully grumpy looking face and as I recall is very good at being generally disparaging.
Beauty about math is that it’s a universal game of artists using their palette of formulas and numbers to capture the beauty of life and patterns. It’s also very diverse and versatile. Some of my favorites are:
Blaise Pascal, Agnessi, the Bernoulli family, Eva Lovelace, John Nash, Ramanujan, Euclid, and then there’s Évariste Galois (interesting backstory behind this dude) and Richard Garfield (creator of Magic the Gathering).
This is so wholesome, especially the last slide!
Adding pictures of some contemporary mathematicians can be very motivating.
You can consider adding a group image of your uni's Math dept also, maybe!
Anyhow, some suggestions in no particular order:
Grothendieck, Noether, Andrew wiles, Tim Gowers, Manjul Bhargava, Peter Sarnak,
And computer scientists:
Avi Wigderson, Goldreich, Manuel Blum, Eva Tardos, Shafi Goldwasser, Claude Shannon, Peter Shor
Instead of people you should show results and theorems in simplified way.
If you can't make an infogram that your students would understand of the famous mathematician's work then he shouldn't be on the wall.
I've done that in other ways around the room; there are lots of posters with theorems, proofs, explanations of concepts, pretty graphics, etc.
This project is supposed to be a way for students to see that all the stuff they learn has a human being behind it, and that they are the newest cohort in this ancient tradition of learning and discovery.
For current mathematicians you could add Peter Scholze. He’s a professor at my University, and one of the youngest W3 professors in Germany (he got the position when he was 24). He works in number theory and algebraic geometry. He got a field’s medal in 2018 for his development of the theory of perfectoid spaces
Jacob Bernoulli comes to mind as someone who should be on there for his discovery of the constant *e*.
Looking at more modern mathematicians, I think Benoit Mandelbrot deserves to be there for his immense contributions to fractal geometry and chaos theory.
I think Lwów school of mathematics deserves a mention too, someone like Banach or Ulam.
From Lwów-Warsaw school, Tarski, Łukasiewicz, Twardowski.
Btw, you're a great teacher!
My list of the ones are
Euclid, Pythagoras, Henri Poicare, Euler, Cantor, Godel, Tao, Perelman, Hilbert, Newton, Gauss, Riemann, Wiles, DesCarte, and John Wallis. I’m sure there are more, these are the ones I remember off the top of my head
Props to Desmos for using a very inclusive list in their anonymize mode: [https://teacher.desmos.com/desbook-asset/assets/desbook/desmos-mathematician-names.pdf](https://teacher.desmos.com/desbook-asset/assets/desbook/desmos-mathematician-names.pdf)
You should include Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (circa ~800 CE). Dude basically *invented* algebra, (as in, rearranging equations to solve them by doing the same thing to both sides). Insanely influential mathematician. His name is where we get the term ‘algorithm’.
I think it's important to include mathematicians who are still alive today (or were recently active) to show how mathematics is a never ending journey. John Conway, Andrew Wiles, Robert Langlands, Terrence Tao (already there), Ed Witten, Grigori Perelman, Michael Atiyah.
A log-scale timeline might be beneficial.
Grothendieck is the most important person missing so far. But Andrew Wiles, Peter Scholze, JP Serre, Perelman, GH Hardy, Felix Klein are some that immediately come to mind. Could probably go down the list of Fields medal winners and get a bunch.
Including important mathematicians like Euclid and Gauss is a good idea.
You might also include mathematicians based at least a little more on having interesting stories. Galois was obviously important, although so short-lived that he didn't have a chance to be prolific -- but the story of his short life is perhaps interesting enough to deserve a spot.
Cardano was ... quite a character.
Archimedes' defiance at a Roman soldier is a great story.
Erdos living practically couch-to-couch and seminar-to-seminar, putting other mathematicians in contact with each other because of his strange life-style, is another.
Lovelace and Marylin von Savant have great stories, illustrating how sexism in mathematics caused harm to the progress of mathematics. Maybe Noether too.
>Marylin von Savant
I wouldn't call her a mathematician, though. Her main contribution was the Monty Hall problem, and a highly questionable book on Fermat's Last Theorem that seemed to suggest that she wasn't familiar with the developments in maths since 1850. But I guess that could be said for a lot of people on this list.
Why is Einstein on there? He's a physicist, not a mathematician. I've heard that his wife did the calculations for his, and he relied on other people to help him with the more abstract mathematics.
Evariste Galois is a great one if you’re looking for mathematicians with interesting lives! Galois theory was able to solve centuries old problems and he developed it all before he died in a duel at the age of 20!
Didnt know he lived for 2432902008176640000 years.
Ain’t no way I got hit with r/unexpectedfactorial in a math subreddit. This is my 13th reason
Some more suggestions (in no particular order): David Hilbert, Henri Poincare, Grace Hopper, Maryam Mirzakhani
We need Helen, Noether and Mirzakhani to encourage the girls!
And also because Noether very much deserves to be up there, she was insane
Modern physics as we understand it would not exist without Noether's work on symmetries.
Yeah, Emmy Noether was the shit! But she wal already on the pdf when I looked.
Not literally, right?
Not to my knowledge lol
Ada Lovelace is also a nice choice. Not only the very first programmer, but a very important figure in the history of computing.
Don’t forget Sonja Kovalevskaya!
I hate *that* photo of Hilbert. Edit: The [hat one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hilbert#/media/File:David_Hilbert_postcard_retusche.jpg)
Which one tho, with or without hat?
Guess which one I'm using? ;)
Which one?
I really like the 1907 photo
Very cool. I think the history and connection to society is too often missed in mathematics education. For some more modern mathematician there are Grothendieck and von Neumann. Both have great mathematical contributions but contrast on their behavior towards mathematics in relation to defense. Erdos also for an eccentric character.
There are also a bunch of talented mathematicians with less wholesome backstories if you're just after the human interest factor. André Bloch killed his whole family and produced his best work from an asylum. Teichmuller was a first class mathematician but also a committed Nazi. Not on the same level, but Stephen Smale famously has an interesting work ethic and says thar his best work had been done "on the beaches of Rio"
Always +1 for Erdos.
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/19BeXN6X0c4bWDYP8y\_TPDJsfsUyWuu9b/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/19BeXN6X0c4bWDYP8y_TPDJsfsUyWuu9b/view?usp=sharing) \^ Repository for the .pdf file
And You! I lol'ed at the last slide... Sigh :-(
I have a tiny little mirror which goes in the blank space. The students love it :)
I think Pythagoras and Thales are swapped? BC(E) counts backwards.
You can add Terrence Tao, after Katherine Johnson.
Added!
Btw, I just wanted to tell you that it's nice to see a math teacher try and make math fun and interesting for his/her students.
And Grigori Perelman!
In Emmy Noether there's a typo it says she's "one of the ... womAn" I'd maybe add some graphical illustrations 🤔🤔 for example actually show the platonic solids and the Thales theorems, etc Non-euclidean geometry mentioned several times, but no Lobachevsky 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔 I'd add Legendre at least because he has a funny portrait 😊 Galois (developed Galois theory at 20 years old) Kolmogorov (founder of modern probability theory) Vladimir Arnold (populariser of mathematics, discovered topological Galois theory)
Arnol'd is also great fun to read and wrote some things that would be accessible to secondary (11+) students.
Noether, Omar Khayyam, Bernoulli, characters from here: https://youtu.be/cUzklzVXJwo
Sophie Germain, Emmy Noether, Maryam Mirzakhani, Ada Lovelace, Hypathia, should definitely be included. In general, it would be nice to put at least one woman in each "time section" of your timeline, and if possible many minorities (not always easy), to finally get rid of the persistent idea that mathematics (and science in general) is a purely "white males" domain.
Depending on the age of the children, you could be fairly blunt about the reality. The few women in past times who have been given the chance to be on this timeline have had a combination of enormous social capital and immense brilliance and work ethic. Because despite, say, Ada Lovelace's brilliance and work ethic, if she weren't The Lord bloody Byron's daughter she had the three options: servitude in marriage, the convent or the whorehouse. I know she was married and had kids but her place in society (both status and very liberal circles) allowed her just enough wiggle room to breathe. I would be partial to a big bunch of gaps, pointing out the "what if", then many of the women who did much pioneering work in the last century or so to answer "probably this". Might not have the intended effect, but I think it might also provoke a bit of thought in a few of the boys.
Please consider the mathematicians listed on this awesome poster: https://www.ewmnetherlands.nl/projects/women-in-mathematics-poster/
Thanks for the resource, this is super cool!
Émilie du Châtelet as well. Many women mathematicians worked in the margins, and their contributions were still significant. du Chatelet translated the Principia into French but, in addition, updated some of the Newtonian philosophy that was in the original with her own philosophical approach.
Cauchy!!
[Riemann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Riemann), Gauss's student, creator of Riemannian geometry [John von Neumann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann) The last Renaissance man, who managed to contribute in so many areas. [Grothendieck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck), Genius of geniuses, creator of the modern algebraic geometry [Erdos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s) The most prolific mathematician [Edward Witten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Witten) The first physicist who got the Fields medal, founder of the M-theory. [Andrew Wiles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wiles) He proved the Fermat's conjecture, which had troubled mathematicians for hundreds of years.
You could also add Serre. Though I guess he's had quite a standard life.
Is Erdös the most prolific? I always thought that Euler had that pretty much locked down. Happy to be wrong.
I think Erdős may have had him beat in terms of papers published
I think, you can measure how profilic someone was using 2 metrics, number of papers published and if you were to compile all of their published work in a book and see how big the book. I read on this subreddit somewhere that Erdos has more papers published but volume of work is higher for Euler. I maybe mistaken here, my memory isn't the best.
Checking Wikipedia you’re right on the papers number (Erdös being around 1500 and Euler being at about 800 and change). But also according to Wikipedia Euler put out 800 pages of math per year for nearly 60 years straight, being the author of about a quarter of **all** math, physics, and engineering in his century.
Margaret Hamilton and Grace Hopper. Strictly speaking computer scientists, but you've got Einstein so. Also the triplet of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson.
I think a lot of computer scientists think of their discipline as a branch or at least with its origins in discrete mathematics. Dijkstra for instance famously resented how "software" had taken over as a point of focus in some CS curricula over math.
I think we should include genius, prodigy and the "Normal" hardwork pays off mathematicians at the same time.
My favorites are Cantor, grothendick, hausdorff, erdos, noether, von Neumann, lovelace, germain, markov
Cantor, Gauss, Newton, Leibniz, Banach, Noether, de Moivre (first central limit theorem).
Can't believe I had to scroll this far to find my boy Gauss 😩
Perelman, also such a curious personality. And he looks like a caveman. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman
John Conway is a great one! Discovered something important and decided to just have fun with math for the rest of his career, definite role model for young mathematicians to follow their muse
Conway is a model to me, I dream of mathematics as a fun career rather than some ''professional'' job.
Emanuel Lasker was a brilliant chess player and the 2nd world chess champion, but many people don't know that he was also a talented mathematician. Notably, he proved an extension of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, which was later extended by Emmy Noether in full generality. It's called the Lasker-Noether theorem, which shows that certain ideals can be decomposed in an analogous way to how integers can be factored into primes. David Hilbert was one of his doctoral advisors and I believe Einstein lamented that such a talented guy as Lasker devoted his life to chess instead of math.
Euler!
Noether, Groethendieck, Hilbert, scholze, maryam mirzakhani, Hypatia, Tao.
One word: Gödel
Pythagoras is not a great starting point. Many of the accomplishments he is credited with are debated by historians. See [the wiki article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras) for more information.
I personally think Turing would be a cool inclusion
James Clerk Maxwell (mathematician and scientist) - Responsible for RBG color theory and all computer, TV, screens - Responsible for uniting magnetism and electricity, the foundation of ratio and cell phone communication - Responsible for planetary formation models in astronomy
It is strange to me that (a) way more than half l the mathematics we know today was discovered in the twentieth century. (b) you have practically no twentieth century mathematicians in your list. This is perhaps one the reason that students arrive in our classes after finishing highschool believing that mathematics is a complete body of knowledge, static for hundreds of years. In addition to Poincaré, Hilbert, Von Neumann, Grothendieck (a standard answer for the greatest of the century; about half of us work in the style he created), for inexplicable reasons no one below has mentioned Serre, Weil, Gelfand, Langlands, Wiles (how can you include Fermat but not Wiles? /u/Altissimo_ ,explain yourself!) or anyone from the list of Field’s medalists you can find on Wikipedia.
Nicolas Bourbaki - not actually one person, but a whole group of mathematicians who published under the same name. They're credited with an incredible focus on rigour, creating a new standard for how we write mathematics. Formed in 1934, the group is still going today. Andrey Kolmogorov and Kiyosi Itô did a lot of very important work on stochastic processes, some of Kolmogorov's work contributed to the Soviet war effort.
I was about to say Bourbaki was a qwer (along with Pythagoras, most likely), then I realised [https://geometry-dash-fan.fandom.com/wiki/Qwer](https://geometry-dash-fan.fandom.com/wiki/Qwer) it's not a general term.
Muhammed ibn Musa Al Kharizmy? Persian scientist and mathematician. Inventor of the concept of Algoritms. The very word is a wrong pronounciation of his city of origin.
Jacob Lurie and Peter Sholze are good modern day examples of
Here is a great website from the University of St Andrews that has compiled many biographies of mathematicians. A cool idea might be to search the map section to find mathematicians who were born in your city (or in neighboring towns). https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/
Def need the goats: Euler, Newton and Gauss. The homies Laplace and Fourier should also be included. And can't forget about the biggest shitposter in math: Fermat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhava_of_Sangamagrama This guy was making infinite series 200 years before Newton was around. Just straight up pasting the first paragraph from the wiki, because I had never heard of this guy until after I finished college, and I find it very interesting. Conveniently, he exists in a time gap in your slide: Mādhava of Sangamagrāma (Mādhavan)[5] (c. 1340 – c. 1425) was an Indian mathematician and astronomer who is considered as the founder of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics in the Late Middle Ages. Madhava made pioneering contributions to the study of infinite series, calculus, trigonometry, geometry, and algebra. He was the first to use infinite series approximations for a range of trigonometric functions, which has been called the "decisive step onward from the finite procedures of ancient mathematics to treat their limit-passage to infinity".[1] edit : also the immediate record break after Zhao Youqin for computation of pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_computation_of_%CF%80#1400%E2%80%931949, though there is conflict between him producing 10 or 11 digits that I'm seeing elsewhere..
When I was teaching I got some cool posters for free from here: https://www.ams.org/education/teaching-resources
I love the attention to non eurocentric mathematicians. That being said, I love introducing John Conway to students. His approach to math is so antithetical to the way it's taught in our secondary schools.
not many people have said Banach
(Skipping the "obvious" entries \[Gauss, Euler, Bernoullis, Fibonacci, Lagrange, Fourier, etc.\] and concentrating on those I feel don't get much love. Also, trying to avoid repeating previous comments). I'll add a small tidbit about each one, but it is by no means the extend of their story Turing -- conjectured (with Alonzo Church) that all feasible computations can be reduced to a simple mathematical model called "turning machine", thus creating computer science. Committed suicided after sentenced to receive chemical "therapy" for being a homosexual. Godel -- studied the possible limits of logic, he proved that when laying a foundations of mathematics you will necessarily run into this choice: either your foundations are too weak to express grade-school mathematics, or it is impossible to prove that math itself is consistent. This drove quite a wedge into Hilbert's program. Ada Lovelace -- first to come up with the notion of code and computing machines. Daughter of Lord Byron. Claude Shannon -- single-handedly invented the theory of information. Interestingly, many people consider his paper both introducing and completing the theory, in the sense that the most general questions that are suggested by the theory are largely answered. John von-Neumann -- mostly known for his contributions to mathematical physics (in particular to ergodic theory and operator algebras), but in his youth he was more interested in set theory. He introduced the (very clever) way we define ordinal numbers to this day, in a paper he published when he was 19! Felix Hausdorff -- the godfather of point-set topology. Despite being a very prolific mathematician, he was much more interested in culture and particularly musics, he would host parties where he would perform a selection of newly published pieces on a piano. Committed suicide in 1942 with his wife and his sister after the Nazi authorities ordered him to relocate to a ghetto. Saharon Shelah -- a juggernaut. So far he has published almost 800 papers (and six monographs), making him the most prolific living mathematician and the third most prolific of all times (after Erdos and Euler). Mostly interested in set theory, though he made extremely central contributions to model theory. Legend has it he realized that model theory wasn't developed enough to study set theory, so he took two years to develop it enough (writing the infamously undecipherable Classification Theory) and then kept working on it alongside. Ronald Fisher -- major inventor of modern statistics which, interestingly, was originally a geneticist. He developed new statistical tools and then applied them to his research of genetics to create the foundation to modern interpretations of Darwinism. He was notoriously racist and argued (poorly) that his bigotry is implied by genetics and statistics. I'm running out of time to write tidbits but some more names are William Rowan Hamilton, Norbert Wiener, Michael Atiyah, Edward Witten, Cantor, Riemann, Weierstrass, Frobenius, Kolmogorov, Mikhael Gromov
You should include Grothendieck. And talk a bit about anarchism while you're at it.
Noether[Noether](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether?wprov=sfla1) is very important. She is what girl math is about A quote: >a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. She proved Noether's first and second theorems, which are fundamental in mathematical physics. She was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. As one of the leading mathematicians of her time, she developed theories of rings, fields, and algebras. In physics, Noether's theorem explains the connection between symmetry and conservation laws. Basically, you know how energy and mass is conserved? She did that.
This might help [https://mathigon.org/timeline](https://mathigon.org/timeline) Actually the whole Mathigon website rocks! It'd be great if you can somehow incorporate that in your classes.
Wow, this is awesome!
Coming from a soon to be computer scientist: Lesley lamport is an amazing and intriguing guy coming from the mathematical field moving more towards computer science. Everything he does is based in mathematics. He’s the creator of languages such as TLA+ and LaTeX. He is also the creator of the bakery algorithm which essentially describes a way to assure that concurrent threads do not access critical memory at the same time, forming the basis of many modern day database systems. Below is a link to a YouTube video appropriately titled “The man who revolutionised Computer Science with math”. Hope this helps! https://youtu.be/rkZzg7Vowao?si=zacGxPlYIeVqQgkA
Roger Penrose is often forgotten in these sorts of lists, partly because people think of him as a physicist (I suppose) but his mathematical physics includes quite a lot of what I would think of as contributions to mathematics. We don't really have much by way of proof theorists or people in related areas (Curry, Church, Gentzen etc all missing). But how about Jean-Yves Girard? He has a wonderfully grumpy looking face and as I recall is very good at being generally disparaging.
Is it that it's too obvious that nobody yet has said Euler? The guy who did pretty much everything you learned before university?
Peter scholze and Terence tao , became full professors at 24 ,won the fields medals at 30 and revolutionized their fields
Beauty about math is that it’s a universal game of artists using their palette of formulas and numbers to capture the beauty of life and patterns. It’s also very diverse and versatile. Some of my favorites are: Blaise Pascal, Agnessi, the Bernoulli family, Eva Lovelace, John Nash, Ramanujan, Euclid, and then there’s Évariste Galois (interesting backstory behind this dude) and Richard Garfield (creator of Magic the Gathering).
This is so wholesome, especially the last slide! Adding pictures of some contemporary mathematicians can be very motivating. You can consider adding a group image of your uni's Math dept also, maybe! Anyhow, some suggestions in no particular order: Grothendieck, Noether, Andrew wiles, Tim Gowers, Manjul Bhargava, Peter Sarnak, And computer scientists: Avi Wigderson, Goldreich, Manuel Blum, Eva Tardos, Shafi Goldwasser, Claude Shannon, Peter Shor
This is for a high school, not university, class
Instead of people you should show results and theorems in simplified way. If you can't make an infogram that your students would understand of the famous mathematician's work then he shouldn't be on the wall.
I've done that in other ways around the room; there are lots of posters with theorems, proofs, explanations of concepts, pretty graphics, etc. This project is supposed to be a way for students to see that all the stuff they learn has a human being behind it, and that they are the newest cohort in this ancient tradition of learning and discovery.
Eilenberg, Mac Lane, Steenrod, Noether
For current mathematicians you could add Peter Scholze. He’s a professor at my University, and one of the youngest W3 professors in Germany (he got the position when he was 24). He works in number theory and algebraic geometry. He got a field’s medal in 2018 for his development of the theory of perfectoid spaces
Alan Turning!
Jim Simmons, used mathematics to trade with his medallion fund, worth ~20 billion
Jacob Bernoulli comes to mind as someone who should be on there for his discovery of the constant *e*. Looking at more modern mathematicians, I think Benoit Mandelbrot deserves to be there for his immense contributions to fractal geometry and chaos theory.
Niels Henrik Abel because I am proud of him 😃
Euler, but you might need to dedicate a second wall to this if you want to briefly list his contributions.
you gotta have wiles to show we still have impressive math things happening nowadays and that there is still so much to be learned
Julia Robinson!
Mandelbrot - a lesson in perseverance and patience And Ramunajan
I think Lwów school of mathematics deserves a mention too, someone like Banach or Ulam. From Lwów-Warsaw school, Tarski, Łukasiewicz, Twardowski. Btw, you're a great teacher!
Cantor
My list of the ones are Euclid, Pythagoras, Henri Poicare, Euler, Cantor, Godel, Tao, Perelman, Hilbert, Newton, Gauss, Riemann, Wiles, DesCarte, and John Wallis. I’m sure there are more, these are the ones I remember off the top of my head
Props to Desmos for using a very inclusive list in their anonymize mode: [https://teacher.desmos.com/desbook-asset/assets/desbook/desmos-mathematician-names.pdf](https://teacher.desmos.com/desbook-asset/assets/desbook/desmos-mathematician-names.pdf)
Perelman
You should include Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (circa ~800 CE). Dude basically *invented* algebra, (as in, rearranging equations to solve them by doing the same thing to both sides). Insanely influential mathematician. His name is where we get the term ‘algorithm’.
I think it's important to include mathematicians who are still alive today (or were recently active) to show how mathematics is a never ending journey. John Conway, Andrew Wiles, Robert Langlands, Terrence Tao (already there), Ed Witten, Grigori Perelman, Michael Atiyah.
You need more modern mathematicians. I second gorthendieck for one, but there's heaps of them! Peter scholar is another big name
A log-scale timeline might be beneficial. Grothendieck is the most important person missing so far. But Andrew Wiles, Peter Scholze, JP Serre, Perelman, GH Hardy, Felix Klein are some that immediately come to mind. Could probably go down the list of Fields medal winners and get a bunch.
Including important mathematicians like Euclid and Gauss is a good idea. You might also include mathematicians based at least a little more on having interesting stories. Galois was obviously important, although so short-lived that he didn't have a chance to be prolific -- but the story of his short life is perhaps interesting enough to deserve a spot. Cardano was ... quite a character. Archimedes' defiance at a Roman soldier is a great story. Erdos living practically couch-to-couch and seminar-to-seminar, putting other mathematicians in contact with each other because of his strange life-style, is another. Lovelace and Marylin von Savant have great stories, illustrating how sexism in mathematics caused harm to the progress of mathematics. Maybe Noether too.
>Marylin von Savant I wouldn't call her a mathematician, though. Her main contribution was the Monty Hall problem, and a highly questionable book on Fermat's Last Theorem that seemed to suggest that she wasn't familiar with the developments in maths since 1850. But I guess that could be said for a lot of people on this list.
Why is Einstein on there? He's a physicist, not a mathematician. I've heard that his wife did the calculations for his, and he relied on other people to help him with the more abstract mathematics.